Hey people,
any info on being able to pay for cosmetics instead of watching Twitch? I’d rather support the devs directly, instead of giving Amazon my data and connecting services.
Generally I think it’s not a good idea to put cosmetics behind a three day period of attainability, instead of giving (especially new) players the opportunity to just pay for them. I know quite a lot of people who wouldn’t watch streams of games they already own themselves. This is just pushing some service in front of cosmetics that would be really cool to own, but are (at least to me and several other people I know) a nuisance.
In short: Maybe give players the option to “buy” a Twitch drop pack.
Thanks
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I know this is not the point, but you can’t really escape that. Amazon already has your data. So does Meta. So does X. So does Google. So do thousands of other companies. They all buy data from each other.
As long as you use the internet, they all have your data.
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No, I don’t think they have “my” data. 
I am very well aware of all the data collectors and don’t have any accounts anywhere - I also don’t use any of my private data online, only redirect-data.
Aside from that, feeding them the information is not really what I want, even IF they had some data of me. I also think direct support for the devs would be way more adequate, as I know where the money would land, instead of giving companies I don’t like a 40% (random number) share of everything.
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I believe twitch drops are not designed for the players, but for the streamers.
If streamers believe LE will bring them more viewers (thanks to the drop), they will play it. And if streamers play LE, they bring their followers (called followers for a very good reason) with them.
If people can buy the cosmetics, it means less viewers. And therefore less streamers trying to grab these precious views.
Edit: I am with you on the concept, I wouldn’t watch some random stranger playing a game to save my life, let alone to get cosmetics. But in terms of marketing it wouldn’t make much sense.
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It’d still be a win-win. People who don’t like paying for these rewards could still watch the stream of games… they already own. I’d also argue that a really huge percentage of people are just lurking to get the rewards and not really caring about what is happening in the background, as long as they get their stuff.
Edit: I mean… who on earth watches a stream for drops when they don’t even have the game?
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Absolutely true, but it doesn’t matter.
Twitch or Youtube or whatever only counts the amount of views, they don’t measure the attention given to the screen. The total viewers is the only thing of interest to the streamers.
Probably nobody. That’s not the point. Let me try to explain…
Streamer X, who streams PoE and GD, has 10,000 followers. They play, obviously, PoE and GD.
When he hears about the twitch drops, he decides to do a bit of LE. Suddenly his account is credited with 30,000 views, mostly LE people just letting it roll to get the drops, who don’t care about his streams.
But his original 10,000 have now been made aware of LE through his channel. Maybe they didn’t watch the whole stream, but like the good sheep (I mean, followers) they are, quite a few will buy LE.
So: more views for the influencer, and more influence spread in LE’s direction. Win-win indeed.
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I don’t think “marketing” your game counts as a reasonable answer here. The target group are people who already paid you to get the game. EHG would get nothing directly out of Twitch Drops (except some Amazon money for the deal). I’d even argue that paying EHG the same amount of money, maybe even +10%, would be better for the company itself than going the other way around via Amazon / Twitch services.
I’m not even talking about “removing” Twitch Drops entirely, but giving new players (or players who didn’t have a chance to watch a stream in 3-4 days) a chance to get the cosmetics by just paying raw money.
It’s not as clear cut as that, though. The vast majority of players will never buy MTX. They wouldn’t buy MTX even if they were 0.1$ each. This has been studied before and is just part of our mentality/psychology.
It’s also part of our mentality/psychology to be attracted to exclusive stuff, be it rewards or other things. Humans love being part of the elite (even if their idea of elite is completely different from someone else’s). This is a big driving factor for conspiracy theories, for example.
So, adding exclusive twitch drops will cause more content creators to join that wouldn’t do it otherwise. It might even cause a bunch of content creators that didn’t care that much about LE or weren’t even aware of it to start streaming LE.
Not only that, those creators will be streaming LE all the time during those days, rather than switch to another game.
All of that is added revenue for LE. Not because they get money from twitch (I don’t know if they do, but it’s not important, getting no money from them is still worth it) but because they get new players.
So getting new players from twitch drops is pretty much guaranteed. Selling them isn’t. Not only does it remove the “exclusiveness” which attract a bunch of people, it’s not even guaranteed that players would buy them anyway.
There will be a lot more MTX available for sale. If they have 50 skill MTX for sale, will you buy all 50? I would say you won’t, so you still have a lot of MTX available to support EHG.
So, in conclusion, in regards to:
The target group aren’t people that already have LE. Those are just “collateral” that get some freebies. The target group is actually people that don’t have LE and that will buy it when they see their content creators playing the game.
So marketing is a reasonable answer here because twitch drops are 100% about marketing.
Again. I’d like to make my point clear here: It is NOT about the people who’d watch the stream anyway and get their drops via spending time in a stream. It is about people who DON’T like doing that. It is an almost guaranteed win to just give the players the option to buy them instead of giving them via Twitch Drops, as the people would rather watch a stream if they had the option, as you already said here:
So paying would be a viable option then. Why shouldn’t it be implemented?
I understand that. But the reason twitch drops are effective is their exclusiveness factor. Much like you getting exclusive MTX is an effective factor for selling the deluxe and ultimate editions.
If anyone could simply buy those MTX whenever they wanted, why would anyone buy a deluxe or ultimate edition?
The same applies to twitch drops. Or seasonal rewards like PoE does. It’s the fact that they’re exclusive and you belong to a select few that makes them attractive.
I can understand the FOMO for people that can’t or don’t want to do that, but it’s not a guaranteed win to remove their exclusiveness. That’s just how our psychology works and how marketing uses that.
I don’t understand what you mean, since it seems to go entirely counter to what I was saying.
If they made a twitch package MTX to sell in the game, very few people would buy it. Just like very few people will buy any MTX. However, not being exclusive anymore means less players would join LE during that campaign, for all the reasons already mentioned.
Players might not buy MTX, but they would buy the game if it seemed fun and had the added advantage of getting free stuff. Even if they would never care about that stuff before.
That doesn’t make a lot of sense. You can’t really compare a single paid MTX and a whole pack of paid MTX to a “free claimable” pack of cosmetics and paying for it. There’s a vast difference between these two.
I’d also argue that the exclusivity thing doesn’t have to go away. Let’s say the “new players” get what they get when they start the game, but it would be easily doable to give the players the opportunity to buy the “Twitch Packs” for 1 month after they’ve been given away. It works in a lot of other games - recurring skin packs. PlanetSide 2 has been doing it for a long time and it worked really well.
I doubt it’s “impossible”. It’s just more a “how do you handle it” thing.
That can be done. But it cannot be announced in advance.
The entire business model is based on FOMO. If people know for sure the pack will be available later on, there is no FOMO anymore, and the entire system flops.
Not really. Companies don’t give away stuff just because. They do it because it will, ultimately, given them money in the long run. Either because they get goodwill out of it or because they get new customers.
Giving exclusive MTX for deluxe and ultimate editions means some people will pay more for the game than they otherwise would.
Giving exclusive MTX for twitch drops means they will get more new players than they otherwise would.
The principle is always the same: getting a lot of customers/players so they give you more money.
Recurring works when you simply have limited timeframes for it. The current supporter packs will be gone a couple of weeks into the season. If they decide to bring them back for a month in a couple of years, that works fine.
It doesn’t work when having them is a reward. Either because you did the season challenges, like in PoE1, or because you were part of the new season launch, like in twitter drops.
Recurring those to be available to everyone would cheapen the value they had in the first place and would cause every future “exclusive” reward to also lose value, since players would know that they would never really be exclusive or special and could be recurred every time.
You keep hogging the same issue.
I am still talking about the people who’d pay money for something that is usually free - in the same time frame, not necessarily 2 years later. That would be just “on top” of the Twitch drops. That’d be a win-win. If they’d release that, I am sure some people would buy it, as I have several friends who’d do so.
You’re talking about the principle of Twitch Drops themselves. I know about them and I don’t deny that they have their legitimate reason. This is, however, not the reason I started this topic. It is the stuff that adds on top of it.
We’re not talking about different things. We’re talking about the same thing.
-Only a small minority of players buy MTX. You and your friends would buy these packs, but the vast majority of players wouldn’t.
-Twitch drops work because they’re exclusive. They bring in a lot of new players. If they’re not exclusive, they don’t bring as many new players.
Would the amount of new players lost for these rewards not being exclusive be offset by the amount of people that would buy those MTX? Probably not, especially because people a minority of those new players will buy MTX and also because those that want to support EHG will still buy MTX, just not the ones offered in the twitch drops.
Like I said, there will most likely be dozens of MTX available. You won’t buy them all. So why does it bother you that you won’t be able to buy these specifc 6 out of all the available ones when you will most likely ignore dozens more MTX that you will never buy either?
I dont mind logging into Twitch to get drops (free ones). I don’t do the buy gift subs for cosmetics unless its something craaaaaaaaazy cool.
